152 LIVES OF GLADSTONE AND COBDEN

the conditions of life among the people. Other
agitations there had been and were, preceding it
or running parallel with it; the Catholic Emancipa-
tion movement was one, the Chartist movement was
another, and both, indeed, were portentous. But
none touched the life of the people so closely as this.
The " condition of England " was at that moment
so critical as to have become itself a phrase on
everyone's lips. The Factory system had sprung
up like a vast and brooding cloud over the rural land-
scape, and with it such a condition of servitude,
want, overcrowding, disease, and heavy-eyed despair
as England had never known in all her social
history. The condition of England in those days
has been painted with the hand of a master, and
the vision of a seer, in Disraeli's Sybil, and there is
no reason to suppose that that terrible picture of
the exploitation of the newly poor by the newly
rich is overdrawn. " A wail of intolerable serfage,"
in the words of Disraeli, went up from the land.
There was, as the same writer has remarked
elsewhere, an enormous growth in wealth with no
proportionate advance in our moral civilization.
Population had grown amazingly—it had not
outgrown wealth, but had outgrown its distribution.
The altar of Mammon " blazed with triple worship."
We are accustomed to think of the Victorian Age
as the age of complacent wealth and opulent
materialism, and the spectacle revolts us. What
we forget is the heroic efforts made by men who
were anything but complacent to cure the evils
it brought with it. It is absurd to accuse the
Victorians of insensibility to such things—the